Vin Diesel hints at ‘merging of brands’ for Marvel universe in Phase 3

Vin Diesel has been doing a lot of talking about his Marvel projects on his junket for Riddick, and he’s been opening up pretty wide for Extra host Maria Menounos. In the chat, he not only confirmed his work for Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy and the 2016 project, but spoke of his future role as a “merging of brands”, which has sent us citizens of the Interwebs into a flurry of speculation.

Diesel first spoke about his dealings with Marvel, and how he was involved at a very early point in the process. As the interview points out, Diesel is known for being involved at multiple creative levels on his projects, and Marvel recognised this in him:

“Marvel are so shrewd…It was for a film that would be introduced in the Phase 3 part of Marvel…In my mind, Marvel was doing it right. They were enrolling me at the ground level, which is the best way to enrol me.”

Then he dropped what is potentially a massive bombshell:

“I get the call, I go down to meet with Marvel. A great meeting. It was even talking about something so big I can’t even talk about because it’s like a merging of brands in a way, which I won’t get into. That was something way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way down the road.”

The “merging of brands” could, of course, be referring to something as simple as an crossover within the worlds of the existing Marvel Studios films, but we now hold out hope he could be referring to something bigger that can’t be announced yet. We would love to believe that Disney/Marvel has come to some kind of agreement with the folks at Fox or Sony, who own properties like the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Spider-man. Or it could be something between other Disney properties and Marvel. Or one of Diesel’s own characters. Or just about anything. He did speak about it being a “fresh IP” in previous interviews, after all.

Diesel went on to talk about Marvel not expecting his fanbase at Comic-Con to be so huge, and even though they are still booked in for 2016, they sensed the need to respond to those fans quickly. From this, the idea of appearing as Groot was born:

It might have been anticlimactic to say “We’re working on something for 2016” and so I just said “You’re going to hear some really big news” and I left at the end of that and it went crazy. I think Marvel got blindsided by how invested that audience was going to be…The next Monday, Marvel talks to me and says “We’re going to send something over in two weeks. We want to focus on the 2016 but we also want to, if possible, answer this growing request for something now.” I don’t have six months to play a character in the immediate future, it’s all booked… there was no way I was going to be able to deliver… there was no way Marvel was going to be able to deliver. after Comic-Con, we were at a stalemate…

We expect that some announcements are going to have to be made shortly, or he’ll just blab the whole shebang in the next interview.